


Gnossis

by sapote



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-25
Updated: 2007-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapote/pseuds/sapote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Tyler, age 21, is a cold-eyed girl with a gun and a Time Lord's evil twin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gnossis

At first living in an alternate universe was candy-bright, shining and a little sideways like a night of hard drinking. Everything smelled and tasted just a little different; the light made the whole world strange, just a little, just the tiniest bit. At first it was giggly, loopy, like having the spins. And then when the Doctor left and the whole world went flat like pop left out too long, she assumed it was just the cosmic equivalent of a bad breakup. When she ran with the Doctor, it was like they were the only real things in the world.

She walked out on the beach and she couldn't feel the sand under her feet. She walked out on the beach and the sand under her feet felt wrong. The world was wrong.

After half a year in a world where every single thing - the weight of gravity, the slant of the sunlight, the smell of exhaust and of grass clippings - was just the tiniest degree off, her grief began to harden into a mania.

Rose Tyler, age twenty-one, worked for Torchwood London. She lived in a fairytale house on a street where it was always raining, and watched her mother grow heavy in the belly and her friends pretend the world was right. She wore purple leather like a carapice, and went to and from Torchwood London in a black car she didn't drive herself, and rarely smiled. The business-suited men and women in Canary Wharf avoided her. She turned all her paperwork in on time, and took the silver-walled elevator down to the basement where the research scientists took apart everything alien in shining white laboratories. Some of what they were doing was horrifying. She paged through the files dispassionately; she was aware of the alien radiation on her skin, the void particles and the changes that the TARDIS had made to her mind. Rose Tyler was numb, and interested in self-preservation.

She never found any aliens at all with two hearts. One with eight, and several with none, and she remembered a museum under the American desert and sent out a team who recovered some Antollian rocketry and a couple of hit pop singles from Centauri Eleven, but no scrap of a gray and fleshy squid in a pepper pot shell.

Rose Tyler started trying to mark out what history would have looked like with no Doctor in it, and it was different. She had a burn on the back of her hand from a running street battle with a squid. It wasn't her universe; she told herself that when she first picked up the gun. The metal was slippery and cool and wrong under her hands, but the whole world was wrong, and she eventually stopped missing.

Rose Tyler's father died, in pain on the asphalt, and her mother died, not knowing her daughter, in pain in the Cyberman factory. Rose watched the mother and father who lived with, increasingly, the detached pleasure one takes in seeing strangers happy. Rose watched her mother's growing belly and thought about the Doctor and Pete Tyler and replacement parts.

(A Doctor who she had let herself forget, who had worn his leather jacket like a carapice, had told her "culture shock" when the world started shaking around her and she realized that there were aliens, and that she was an alien. Pete Tyler got up to get her pregnant mother a glass of juice from the fridge, and Rose watched the two of them. There were aliens. She was an alien. She was from another universe.)

Rose Tyler was a cold-eyed girl with a big gun, and the moment she had a reason she broke the world wide open again. She had to find him. He had to understand, he had to make it right. She watched the marks he made across the world, and she felt like she understood now.

He was patronizing, comforting, the same, right, and when it was all over - because, objectively, Rose Tyler was never against saving the universe - he dropped her back on the beach, with a thin substitution and a hand-pat, like he'd found his pet turtle a friend. She could see how the Doctor - the real Doctor - was better now, less crazed, less likely to laugh while the universe burned down around him. She could see that he couldn't tell that she'd changed at all.

His pet, his self, his half-human clone laughed when the Daleks burned, and Rose Tyler who was baptized by the end of the world turned her face to him and smiled, and the Doctor got back in his space ship and didn't see.

Rose slipped her hand through John Smith's, and said, "We're going to have fun."


End file.
